The Saxon capital sits capaciously like a comfortable old dowager fully dressed in stuffs of a richly dull color. Her thick skirts are spread about her with a contented dignity which does not interfere with her eating large sandwiches openly and vigorously at the opera. To-day the mellow sunlight crowned her ancient nobleness with a becoming hue, as Gard was jogged along in a roundabout way through the city. Here at the left were the august bridges and great park, all famed in Napoleon's battles. Over there were the dowdy royal palaces. There, too, was the house of the sacred Sistine. Her sweet lineaments shone down in almost every American parlor Gard knew.
The dingy baroque architecture, whose general tastelessness was heavily banked up by a multitude of towers, gables and high copings, suggested an old-fashioned residential city of the days of urban fortifications. The uniform arrays of buildings, all pretending to the effect of sumptuousness thickened by weighty proportions and blasphemed by rococo hesitations and doubts, seemed constructed to exalt the doughty glory of Augustus the Strong—Dresden's local Thor, its chief heroic figure in the favorite Teuton galaxy of muscled Titans. Somber medieval squares, blocked away quaintly from the world, were relieved by the celebrated Brühl Terrace, enlivened by gilded statuary and by historic and literary memories.
Through all this metropolis of formidable and dun respectability curved the Elbe as if to round off the massive imitations of something better somewhere else. Hither coursed the smooth brown stream from Bohemia, not far away, through the high fastnesses of the Erz range and the groomed vistas of Saxon Switzerland, and past the frowning old fortress of Königstein, towering near a thousand feet above its untroubled bosom. Kirtley was to find the river, with its carefully tended shores, a companion in many an hour.
CHAPTER IV
Villa Elsa
SUCH in brief was the scene that stretched out around him and enveloped his attention and interest. There was not majesty that would offend, but rather a cosy formality that is the absence of style. It cured somewhat the homesick inclinations that quite naturally haunted him after a wearying day of travel and as nightfall drew down about his loneliness. He was bound for the home of a strange family, speaking a tongue in which he was far from glib. It had been written, though, that the Bucher young people had learned English pretty well at school.
Kirtley reached his destination to find that the parents were waiting expectantly to receive him. With German consciousness, they were stuffily attired for this novel and important event. After staunch greetings he was led into the house past a big angry dog that stood guard tempestuously at the door. Gard found later that such savage barking was quite a feature of the Teuton threshold, and might be considered one bristling aspect or cause of the ungenial development of the social spirit in Germany. Cave canem can hardly be called a suitable first attraction toward the spread of hospitality. He feared he was going to be bitten and wished his welcome had not been complicated with shudders.
The entrance to Villa Elsa consisted of a hallway swimming in heady odors from the strong cooking in the adjacent kitchen. Kirtley stood for a moment stifled. But he was to become more used to the lusty smells that roam about, presumptuous and fortifying, in German households and of which, indeed, all German existence is resolutely redolent. Strength, whether in barking dogs or fumes or what-not, appeals to the race.